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VIRTUALISATION Eolas sues technology and retail giants
VIRTUALISATION Eolas sues technology and retail giants | Eolas sues technology and retail giants |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Wednesday, 07 October 2009 | |
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The first patent, number 5,838,906 (906), describes "A system allowing a user of a browser program on a computer connected to an open distributed hypermedia system to access and execute an embedded program object. The program object is embedded into a hypermedia document much like data objects. The user may select the program object from the screen. Once selected the program object executes on the user's (client) computer or may execute on a remote server or additional remote computers in a distributed processing arrangement. After launching the program object, the user is able to interact with the object as the invention provides for ongoing interprocess communication between the application object (program) and the browser program." This patent has been repeatedly upheld, notably in a $US521 million court judgement against Microsoft in 2003, though Microsoft successfully appealed. The patent was subsequently upheld, despite the demonstration of 'prior art' by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). "The sole difference between the Web browser described in the '906 patent and typical browsers that the patent itself acknowledges as prior art, is that, with prior art browsers, the image is displayed in a new window, whereas, with the '906 browser, the image is displayed in the same window as the rest of the Web page. But that feature (i.e., displaying, or embedding, an image generated by an external program in the same window as the rest of a Web page) was already described in the prior art publications submitted in our section 301 filing", W3C chairman Time Berners-Lee wrote to the US Patent and Trademark Office at the time. Eolas and Microsoft eventually settled their dispute, though the details were kept secret. By then, Microsoft had altered the way Internet Explorer handled ActiveX controls and Java applets to work around the 906 patent. What about the new patent, and who is Eolas targeting in its new law suit? Please read on. |
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